The recent growth of anti-Semitic incidents, most vividly seen in early January’s hostage crisis at a Texas synagogue, is most threatening to Jews who are religiously observant, writes Mark Oppenheimer in the Wall Street Journal (January 19). He notes that most of the recent attacks against Jews, which also include the shootings at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 and a kosher market in New Jersey in 2019, have targeted those involved in identifiably Jewish activities and behavior. While these tragedies have increased the collective insecurity of American Jews overall, Oppenheimer cautions that the reality is more complicated. “The recent heightened antipathy toward Jews hasn’t been focused on the general Jewish population…In the past quarter-century, most American Jews have become completely liberated from the effects of anti-Jewish bias in school, work, social life, housing, and even romance: 61 percent of Jews who married in the past 10 years took a non-Jewish spouse, according to one recent study. And liberated Jews are abandoning Jewish spaces. Only a fifth of Jews attend worship services at least monthly, and only 12 percent weekly.”
Source: Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
Oppenheimer adds that those outside of the Orthodox world will rarely encounter anti-Semitism, but “plenty of Jews who don’t typically enter Jewish spaces are nevertheless deeply involved in Jewish culture [and] they are hardly bystanders when hostages are taken in Texas.” Yet he concludes that an ever-shrinking percentage of Jews will actually be in harm’s way as they remain outside of Jewish institutional life, even if more violence is experienced by Hasidim and others with identifiable lifestyles and practices and “Jews who continue to enter places like synagogues, having decided that praying with fellow Jews is worth the risk of dying with them.”
